An appeals board at the European Patent Office (EPO) has said that applications covering a “product-by-process” method used for developing tomatoes and broccoli can be granted patent protection. The case will now return to the EPO’s Technical Board of Appeal.
The case has proven controversial and attracted criticism from parties such as non-profit group No Patent on Seeds. In October, the organisation protested outside the EPO during the oral proceedings of the case. In a statement issued today (March 27), Christoph Then, a member of No Patent on Seeds, said: “The EPO has paved the way for companies to take control of resources we all need for our daily lives.
“No company should hold monopolies on sunlight, air or water. The same is true for the resources needed for food production,” he added.
Next up: All food? (we have seen this before)
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Extrait : Bientôt dans vos assiettes… – Interview de Patrick Moore
Today’s lesson is brought to you by Dr. Patrick Moore, who has worked for pesticide manufacturers like Monsanto, refusing to drink Monsanto’s product just seconds after claiming it’s safe to do so. Once upon a time, Dr. Patrick Moore was an early Greenpeace member. Now he is a public relations consultant for the polluting companies that Greenpeace works to change: Big Oil, pesticides and GMO agribusiness, forestry, nuclear power… anyone who puts up the money for truth-benders who appear to carry scientific and environmental authority.
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With a diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), Ceres is the largest object in the solar system’s main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. Signs of water were detected on Ceres just last year, and some astronomers think the white spots may be ice at the bottoms of subsurface ice that’s been pushed up from below. Scientists hope the Dawn mission will help us understand how Ceres and other large celestial objects formed.
Dawn is expected to arrive at Ceres on March 6, 2015.
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The most abundant material on Earth didn’t have a name, and, in fact, hadn’t been seen — until now. For the first time ever, scientists have gotten their hands on a sample of bridgmanite, a mineral that is believed to make up more than a third of the volume of the Earth. In a new paper published in Science late last week, Oliver Tschauner of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his team describe bridgmanite for the first time. [via]
AND
Formula: (Mg,Fe)SiO3. System: Orthorhombic. Name: Named in 2014 by Chi Ma and Oliver Tschauner in honor of Percy Williams Bridgman [April 21, 1882 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA – August 20, 1961 Randolph, New Hampshire, USA], winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1946 for his work in high-pressure physics.
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What does the Ebola virus actually do in your body? Why is it so dangerous and why does it kill so many people? We take a look at the apocalyptic war that rages in the body after an infection by the Ebola virus and the soldiers fighting.
Videos, explaining things. Like evolution, time, space, global energy or our existence in this strange universe.
We are a team of designers, journalists and musicians who want to make science look beautiful. Because it is beautiful.
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Illicit fishing goes on every day at an industrial scale. But large commercial fishers are about to get a new set of overseers: conservationists—and soon the general public—armed with space-based reconnaissance of the global fleet. But now environmentalists are using sophisticated technology of their own to peel away that cloak of invisibility. With satellite data from SpaceQuest and financial and engineering support from Google, two environmental activist groups have built the first global surveillance system that can track large fishing vessels anywhere in the world:
Global Fishing Watch.
Oceana has begun using the tool internally to track vessels that have already been blacklisted for fishing illegally, Savitz said. “We can see vessels that appear to be fishing in protected marine areas. Government officials often know about this activity but don’t do anything about it. We’ll use the tool to shine light on this activity and produce public pressure for officials to actually do their jobs.” [Wired]
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Landing accomplished.
While most interviews and articles of the ESA mission talk about the pure science around Comets (their Origin and influence on providing water to earth) or age of discovery (landing on the moon),
less is talked about those more direct important area’s: Comet Mining and Asteroid impact avoidance. We see if E.T. exists later, first let’s make some bucks and avoid being wiped out like the Dinosaurs..
So assuming that NASA is looking carefully at Rosetta finding, before capturing a comet.
And then maybe, we will live after 99942 Apophis. More on these rocky stones here.
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Obama just created a Pacific Ocean reserve almost twice the size of Texas to curb fishing and oil drilling. Surprisingly, it was President George W. Bush who created the national monument during his final weeks in office. But Obama has increased its size nearly six times over, stretching it out to nearly twice the size of Texas. Obama’s gesture, grand as it is, shows how neglected the oceans are: The fact that few Obama political opponents know or even care about the oceans.
It is worth understanding how much the oceans are worth: 3 Trillion dollars and much more on the non-material scale according to McKinsey. Given the ocean’s central role in our global economy, the state of its overall health should terrify us all: D grade. Some 87 percent of global fish stocks are depleted or in serious trouble (UN figures). Of the world’s 17 largest fisheries, 15 are at or over capacity. Meanwhile the world’s population, with ocean food needs is expected to grow by 2 billion by 2050.
These preserves, now cover more than 2 percent of the world’s oceans, the global goal is 10 percent. However, that’s not 2 percent quality, those with actual fish in it. And where’s the effective governance of those seas? Remember the Elephants? Protected? Right.
Still, these big ideas, like the ones the commission is proposing, are worth aspiring to. The good news is big names are taking note. The European Union is aggressively pushing for an international oceans agenda, and Obama and Bush have clearly recognized that ocean conservation will buttress their long-term legacies. Preserving the ocean is a relatively uncontroversial legacy, as both Obama and Bush have found; with luck, world leaders will also champion the world’s most valuable, and least valued, asset. [foreign policy]
More on the Ocean.
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The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found.[guardian]
The big extinction by numbers, in our livetime… well done homo sapiens.
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